Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, August 20, 1996

Rock & Bowl, where the cacophony of balls crashing into pins mixes with the din of disco to form a uniquely San Francisco stew, is closing down this Saturday.

Its home, the Park Bowl on the west end of Haight Street, has been sold and is to become a cavernous Amoeba compact disc store. Rock & Bowl's hilarious hustler of a promoter, Gilbert Klein, has sold the trademark name to an operator in New Orleans and is moving to Rosarita Beach, Mexico, to open a night club.

There will still be bowling at Japantown and in the Presidio, and more lanes are coming to Yerba Buena Center. A knockoff Friday night party called Planet Bowling started up last spring at Bel Mateo Bowl in San Mateo.

But there is nothing in the universe quite like Rock & Bowl, and this is apparent immediately upon entry into the old alley, built in 1952. The lighting is dim and atmospheric in reds and blues, with only the pins brightly lit. The overhead monitors, which would normally project scores, are flashing with music videos and musical film clips dating back to the 1940s.

Park Bowl has 22 lanes with a free pool room, all hidden from the Haight Street entrance. Score is kept on clipboards, if it is kept at all.

"We don't attract the pro circuit here," says Klein. What it does attract are people who want something to do while they drink and hear music besides standing around in a bar, though you can do that too, upstairs in the smoky kitsch of Kegler's Corner.

Rock & Bowl is surely the friendliest alley on earth for bad bowlers. You throw a gutterball, and no one will notice because they're all watching Michael Jackson moonwalk on video on the single big screen or dancing in front of the benches or trying to get the attention of the cocktail waitress.

"I really don't care about the bowling, I'm just here for the social," says Harold Jones, who brought 14 friends for his 34th birthday. The cakes comes with candles, and nobody has to turn out the lights for effect. In 13 1/2 years, Rock & Bowl has hosted hundreds, maybe thousands of birthday parties. There is a kitchen at Park Bowl but they don't make cakes. "The staff is the only thing that's baked on the premises," says Klein. To be fair, so are lots of the customers.

"It's a nightclub that has bowling," says Klein, who sometimes must explain the subtleties of the game to customers. "You throw things," he says, "and knock things down."

A VISIT TO MANHATTAN

Klein, 49, a former talk show host on the irreverent Gilroy country radio station KFAT, got the idea for "Rock & Bowl," after visiting an alley in Manhattan that rocked out on Wednesday nights. "I said, 'I can do this,' " he recalls, " 'and I can do it better.' " Opening night was January 27, 1983, just in time to ride the Haight Street renaissance into the mid-1980s.

This was when retro crooner Chris Isaak dressed up in glittery Hank Snow cowboy suits and played four nights a week at Nightbreak, just a few doors up. Across the street, the bar Rockin' Robins had the feel of a '50s sock hop.

The Full Moon Saloon, a block east, provided a bluesy counterpoint to the hard rock and New Wave of Nightbreak. Across from the Full Moon, where Quicksilver's John Cippolina used to play, was the I-Beam, the city's premiere live music warehouse, which became one of the first clubs to put a mirror ball back up and have '70s dance night, with the late great Buck Naked behind the bar.

"We used to feed off each other," says Klein, who once promoted a rock 'n' roll fantasy camp.

Rock & Bowl was the place to slum for a private party. It drew everyone from the Carole Shorenstein social set to rockers like Todd Rundgren, who closed a tour there, to actors like Robin Williams, who held cast parties there.

"When it did take off, hundreds of bowls across the country copied it," says Don Strain, who has owned Park Bowl since 1977. "One of the things that saved the game was the rock and bowl concept."

Starting with the nightclubs Noc Noc and Nicki's in the lower Haight, any proper Haight Street tour ended up at Rock & Bowl, and Klein would sell out two shifts of 80 to 100 bowlers each.

"It was a velvet groove for me," says Klein.

But then Slim's opened on 11th Street in 1988 and the Paradise Lounge was jumping, and the fulcrum shifted to the comparatively open spaces of SoMa. Now it's all dead and gone, including Cippolina and Buck Naked.

Rock & Bowl is the final link. When bowlers need a special lift, they visit the video booth where Cathy Cohn has been since the start. "They think their favorite song makes them bowl a lot better," says Cohn. The most danceable song through the years has been Glenn Miller's "In the Mood."

"I find that my average is much higher with the videos," says Arthur Botting, 28, "median age for bowlers." Carolyn Nester, 30, a regular for six years, prefers the Beastie Boys. "The more angst the better," says Nester, who wore her bowling shirt with her name on it the previous week and rolled a 175, though she says she'd have done better had not Cohn gone too far into the grunge. "The Nine Inch Nails was too much angst," Nester says.

The weekend admission charge covers all the frames one can bowl. There are two shifts of 1 1/2 hours each, and if people are still bowling on a lane reserved for the late shift, Klein either boots them out or moves them to another vacant lane. "We push them around like cattle." he says. "Belittle them. It makes us feel superior."

TURNING CARTWHEELS

A manager let Nester and her sister Vicki Keavney, 29, keep their lane in return for some somersaults and cartwheels on the concourse carpet. "We bowl until we drop," explains Nester.

Nester once worked in a private bowling club. But nothing compares to the spirit of Rock & Bowl. "This place is the best," she says. "I was heartbroken when I heard it was closing. They don't need another record store."

Japantown Bowl advertises itself as open 24 hours. But one night Nester and her sister got on a bowling jag and went down at 1:30 a.m. to find it closed.

After Saturday night, Nester expects to sit down for a long cry. Then she might just take her 175 average and her monogrammed bowling shirt and retire.

ROCK & BOWL

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